Called it: Microsoft officially getting out of the console game!

LOL, wut?!!!

No it is not. Not even a little. Xbox has been a MASSIVE money pit. The first Xbox lost billions, the 360 squeezed out a tiny profit because they charge people to use their own internet connection and refused to refund faulty units, and the Xbox One is a complete fiasco that will likely cost billions more.

The Xbox brand has been almost completely toxic.

 

That's not what the companies financial statements say. According to them the entertainment division is highly profitable. Sure it's not as significant as something like Windows. But it's far from toxic.

 

That's coming from their quarterly reports. Of course it's going to say everything is great and spin things in their favor. Got to keep them stock prices up and all.

Give me a moment. Let me find something reputable to back up my statement.

 

You haven't ever played in the corporate pond have you? Investors are smart enough to see through that kind of stuff. Plus their are laws against misrepresenting financial data.

You don't sugar coat toxic assets. Nor do you put heavy R&D into them. You live with them long enough to turn them around or divest them.

If the XBox really was dragging Microsoft down, they would have gotten out of the console game. Not announced a plan for consoles into the future.

 

Are you talking about specific investors, such as professional investing companies? (As if we should even automatically assume that just because a company is professional or even successful, that it is somehow automatically intelligent, in a world where rich elitists play by their own rules & they and their often embarrassing offspring own >90% of the world's wealth).

Unless you are specific, this is yet another common fallacy I see posted all over gamedev communities. And boy is it annoying. Annoying enough to point it out when someone is a condescending know-it-all, "You haven't ever played in the corporate pond have you?"

This happens too often in gamedev arguments. When users start to claim that "people" or "investors" or "businesses" are all one person, who conveniently prove their exact argument & exist exclusively to counter someone else's argument.

If I wasn't so lazy, I'd look up which cognitive bias / logical fallacy this is & tell you specifically.

 

Woah, easy.

Bored Mormon and I are buddies and he's just ribbing me.

I didn't take it as condescending at all.

And he is correct, I am not very corporate cultured and am new to following the market.

 

Well that's the thing.

I hear them saying the end of console generations and I'm thinking this is their way of exiting the market. That they're most likely turning manufacturing over to third parties and offering a locked down Windows OS for free.

To me that sounds like they're bailing and trying to take the Xbox kids with them.

 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying dodgy practices don't happen. Corporations are all about making money after all, and they try and do with the maximum efficiency possible.

What I am saying is the specific dodgy practice of cooking the books to make the XBox look better then it is for the share price isn't an especially useful idea. XBox sales are a very public thing, there is a lot of other retailers involved. And the big corporate investors usually do plenty of their own market analysis. It couldn't stay hidden for long.

On top of that you would have to ask why its beneficial to the share price to have a poorly performing asset look good. The share price and actual profits would probably do better from divesting then from accounting games. The money does have to come from somewhere.

That's certainly one way to interpret the announcement. Haven't they been using third party manufacturing for ages anyway?

The biggest problem with the generational console model is that the biggest competitor of the XBox One is the XBox 360. And so on back through the generations. A non generational model might solve part of this problem.

 

I don't know.

Those consoles are currently being sold below cost, so they are dependent on game sales, and compatibility decreases sales. Not increase them.

It seems like a sound idea to let it be a free market. That they can just focus on making the games and let the hardware manufacturers duke it out, because that's a brutal market. But what I fear is that they're going to have this whole "PC master race" mentality that plagues Valve.

Consoles are consoles. PC's a PC's. They are two completely different experiences and a lot of that hinges on the controller.

I've said this a million times and I don't care if no one agrees with me, I'll say it a million more. Gamepads are part of the experience and being less responsive than K&M does not make it worse.

Saying that K&M is better than a controller is like saying a motorcycle is better than a bicycle.

It's just not the same thing.

And just like bicycles and motorcycles you can't compete one with the other.

So if anyone can use K&M then everyone will have to use it just to keep up.

In other words, the moment they allow K&M in the games is going to be the moment it's no longer a console.

 

If the hardware is backwards compatible wouldn't that mean the hardware sales will be fewer but the game sales will be the same? After all why buy newer hardware when your existing console can already handle the games as they are coming out.

 

That is exactly my point. I have a Nexus phone with 128GB of space: is that a lot? By the standards of half of my development career, yes it is. I can run apps, talk to anybody in the world, store tens of thousands of photos, and I have no need for HDD space. We. Are. There. The amount or even the speed of the memory is irrelevant to whether the capability already exists.

I'm "a programmer who knows his stuff" (go dig up some of my possibly-tedious "meandering down memory lane" threads, lol). I can't figure out why you believe there is any difference. Phones in particular really do have just one big chunk of memory. In fact, on Android (I did some dev on the BT stack on slimOS about five or six years ago) when you add a removable SD card, it actually gets treated as if it were really just another part of that same chunk of memory (and this is generally the *NIX way). Only at the device driver level is the distinction made between "this bucket" or "that bucket". Maybe you're confused by the way the memory is mapped sometimes to appear as if there are drives or separate devices available, but that's an OS design choice (and one of the reasons I state we're already there).

You're confusing the Xbox hardware profitability with the overall Xbox lineup. The hardware was always expected to act as a loss-leader for game sales, and it has done that quite well.

 

Yes, for a phone. Your average phone application is very tiny. A phone game doesn't take gigabytes by itself.

 

I managed something around 140 WPM in high school... checked on my first day of typing class, lol. My dad wouldn't let me touch our new computer unless I learned to touch type, so by the time I hit senior high school I'd been typing continuously for maybe 8 years. Thanks to RSI, I'm considerably slower these days!

 

Which is why I wrote this at the end of that same paragraph: "The amount or even the speed of the memory is irrelevant to whether the capability already exists."

Carter is claiming there will be some dramatic revolution in the way OSes work when all this cheap NVRAM becomes available. My point is that the OSes can already handle it.

 

Oh you were responding to Carter. I didn't see the quote of her post you made.

 

Exactly the opposite. When the Xbox One came out, I delayed buying it because I had a giant stack of 360 games that I assumed would be forever orphaned. Compatibility reduces my opportunity-cost of moving to the new platform. I risk "losing" less by making the switch. It makes the new platform's improvements that much more attractive to me as a consumer.

MIND = BLOWN!

 

^^ I actually didn't know that was possible (MIND=BLOWN again). Although I do keep meaning to try one of those mini-keyboards that clips on to the Xbone controller.

 

Sorry this is not true at all. You have to look beyond hardware sales and look at the software column which is where they make their money, especially Xbox Live. This is still a multi billion dollar industry, they might shift around what the consoles look like and release them with different specs but no way they are going to ditch one of their most profitable divisions next to cloud.

 

Just pointing that obvious out, since it's so common in gamedev communities to use imaginary evidence.

Investors know better than to trust Bored Mormon, so why should we? /thread

 

Youre right, phones have revolutionized gaming in such a way that it changed how people program, how blazing fast gaming is, and how everything is structured.

We're already there, which is why im typing this on a computer with 3TB of Ram.

If only I had known before /s

 

Suddenly some of the comments in this thread make a lot more sense.

 

Usually it doesn't trip me up.

 

There is much more to it than I mentioned. It wont just change how we program games, but it will even require a new OS to reach full potential.

It replaces RAM entirely, and destroys any need for a HDD.

All without losing data when powered off.

So all applications are always fully loaded, and instantly turn on in full, on boot. Because it's never off...because it's "on" (loaded) even when powered off.

I finally have the time to explain a bit more & post the link. I wanted to be sure of the name of the tech before I started mentioning it specifically.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2953816/storage/what-3d-xpoint-says-about-the-pc-of-the-future.html

Mind you, this is just one of many possible future technologies that can transform how we use computers, how they work, and eliminating our greatest bottleneck indeed DOES change a lot.

It's weird that you think it changes nothing, when it will change everything. It would quickly replace every single computer in our society as everyone clammers for "instant computers" that feel infinitely faster than everything else. Who would buy junk with HDD in it when they could have always-on powerless?

Phones are not even close to this technology, and their speeds are pathetic. Your post reveals you more than likely dont even know how phone hardware works, its limitations, and talk as if phones have already made the PC obsolete. Weird nonsense.

PC's are still used everywhere, especially in gaming. So even if a phone had this technology, which it doesn't, it would still have serious limitations & remain a separate market than the more capable PC. Youre talking about a PC with XPoint, vs a crappy phone, even trying to tell us I'm "confused" bc I ...underestimate?...the speed & power of....SD cards?...because the phone treats it like normal memory? -_-

 

Dude, consoles are almost always loss leaders. If you just look at hardware sales, of course MS is bleeding money on that.

Even though console hardware is usually midrange level hardware at best, sometimes even below that (for example the PS4 or XBox One), selling a complete midrange gaming PC with controller for 400 bucks is actually quite a feat. Sure, the console makers usually strike deals with the hardware manufacturers, and sometimes save money quite ingeniously, still, fact is they are trying to squeeze in too much hardware for the price.
Idea is to shift as many consoles to gamers as you can, so that the software sales afterwards are as high as possible. And this is where MS will make its money. Given that you sell a single hardware unit, but maybe around 10-20 games on average to every gamer over the lifetime of the console, and once you sold the hardware, have the customer in kind of a stranglehold (as long as it is the only gaming hardware he owns), this kind of pricing makes sense.

I would bet the XBox One is not a complete fiasco. They went with cheap components this time, instead of having IBM design a special Power PC CPU for them they took a semi custom AMD SoC.
If the XBox One has a problem, its that they messed up the release somewhat with their 180s on the always-online and kinect requirements, which drove many peoples to buy a PS4 instead.


Maybe people would believe your wild claims more if you gave a source for them?

 

I sort of wondered if you were talking about crossbarmemory (the generic name) but since I couldn't figure out what you were getting worked up about, I didn't want to derail things by bringing it up. Intel and HP have (separately) been working on it for quite awhile now. HP actually beat Intel to the punch because they discovered the memristor (the "missing" fourth component predicted by theory from the resistor, transistor and capacitor family of basic electronic devices). But who knows, since I've demonstrated I know nothing about any of that, I'm probably wrong.

Phones were only mentioned because they're already used as if they operate in the ways that crossbar promises to make possible. I think that's my point you keep missing, and this is why I say The Revolution will come and go quietly. My point is about how people interact with their devices. Yes it'll be wonderfully convenient but at the end of the day a consumer OS company benefits most from incremental changes. You'll still have apps and hierarchical file storage for organizing your content because it works well and people know how to use it.

Edit: I have a feeling you were talking more about how things work internally (and I went there, too, at some points), and for that I refer you to OS paging and swapping. Here again the kernel-level code abstracts away many aspects of "real" RAM availability by using secondary memory. And yeah it'll be great when that isn't needed but the day-to-day experience shouldn't require any fundamental changes in how one interacts with devices.

Maybe I've just been at this long enough that I've become jaded. I remember being excited about the revolutionary possibilities of adding a hard drive to a computer. Or always-available Internet connectivity. Or wifi.

 

Are you referring to resistive memory? Because Crossbar is the actual company.

 

lol, she warned you I don't know jack about these here compulectronical devices and such.

 

Are you a Sony fan by any chance?

 

If X Box had lost millions or billions I'd say Microsoft would not hesitate to drop it like they dropped Nokia and telephones.

 

Actually, yes? I know it's not colloquially called a "hard drive", but phones and tablets do come with a chunk of persistent storage built in.

Heck, Apple even identifies versions of their iProducts by the size of that chunk of persistent memory.

One chunk of volatile memory that's used for everything, yes. It's still separate from the persistent memory.

An iPhone 6, for instance, comes with 16 or 32 or 64 gigs of storage (persistent memory) and 1gb of volatile memory.

 

Haha, it wouldn't be that utopian. There's plenty of stuff you could do that would eat all of that space. We don't do those things now because we simply can't access it quickly enough. Sure, it'll change things, but it won't eliminate all of the problems - it'll just mean we start working on different problems.

There's also transmission to consider. Sure we can store all that data, and we can access and manipulate it much more quickly, but that's often of limited usefulness unless it can also be moved around effectively. For instance, there's little point in light baking a planet if I can't get that data to my players.

 

That's a heck of a lot of effort to get dodgy controls that are "not a dealbreaker".

On the PS3 I tried a similar product that was a essentially a custom gamepad where one of the thumb sticks was replaced with a mouse. I'm not much of a fan of gamepad aiming, but after playing a bunch of Uncharted choosing between that thing and playing with the gamepad directly was an easy choice. The issue is that Uncharted is tuned to work with the PS3 thumb stick with it's sensitivity curve, along with the game's own tuned sensitivity curve. That will never give you the combined speed and precision of a linear mouse mapping, but speed and precision is not what Uncharted was designed around. Uncharted feels good played with a PS3 controller. It felt like mud played via a mouse emulator.

 

If you go back, Carter was referring to actual hard drives. Spinning metal and floating magnets. You and I agree.

Obviously everyone here understands the difference between storage and system memory. My point is the OSes are already able to abstract that away at most levels of usage, particularly in terms of how people use them (where the phone model works especially well -- again, usage, not performance or quantity of memory, that has always been a moving target).

 

I don't know why I even bother.

Whenever I try to make this point I always have a flood of people who deliberately miss it.

Which, btw, is a BIG reason I avoid the "PC master race" gamers.

 

I think its a silly idea if they go along the path of incremental improvements or modularity.
Kind of the whole point of a console is that it is a standard and that you know that all your games will work on it.

But to me an XBOX always just looked like a PC tower with big green X drawn on anyway. But the point was every XBOX had exactly the same spec (excl. storage).

 

When did this thread evolve into a Console Peasants vs. PC Master Race flame war?
Where do you even read that someone was attacking the console peasnts? All that MV10 was showing was that yes, a computer is a computer, no matter if it is a console or a PC.

Main difference is the stock equipment you get with it, the stock OS, price point and how easy it is to tweak everything to your own needs.

Console tend to be cheaper on the hardware side, but more closed down to tweaking. Windows PCs tend to let your freely tweak to your hearts content, but are far more expensive, especially if you are no building your rig yourself.

About any modern console COULD be used as general purpose PC. The fact it was so easy at the time, and the PS3 was actually bringing a lot of computing power for the price was one reason why Sony dropped the official linux support on the PS3. People started using farms of PS3s as supercomputers -> install linux on a modern console, OR have the platform holder enable normal windows desktop mode in case of the XBOX One, add KB+Mouse, and enjoy a pretty cheap and cheerful PC.

Controller Support has picked up a lot for PC Games since the XBOX 360 Controller is supported by Windows officially. Many PC Games come with built in controller support, and the openess of the platform means KB+M emulation from a controller is just a download away. Then there is the Steam Controller.
I have built my console replacement PC this year after handing over my aging PS3 to my nephew. I grew up to be a console peasant, yet I was to disappointed by the current console generation to fork over 400$ for what is a quite weak gaming PC, I am still not seeing any exclusive games that would sway me to buy a new console, and I have a ton of usable old hardware I had to shift out of my main rigs and was collecting dust. And then there was my sizable Steam library and the fact I could probably buy all the latest games for half the price by going through Steam and waiting for a sale.
And I have to say, the difference between a Windows PC setup to boot into Steam, and a modern console is negligible. You might face the odd game where you need to tweak more to get it running fine on your hardware, or get controller support running. On the flip side, you CAN tweak things. Meaning as long as the developer is not a total moron locking the framerate on the PC port also, you are not force to play at 30Hz if you don't want to.
Most of the time, besides a different interface and Controller (was using XBox Controllers until now, just upgraded to PS4 Controllers), I couldn't really tell the difference to playing on my old PS3... besides the vastly superior hardware surpassing even the PS4 in power, of course


So really, I agree that Controller <-> Mouse+KB are two quite different expieriences. Consoles <-> PCs... not so much. Not anymore. Not as long as you go the extra mile to setup your PC into "Console Mode", or Hack the console to install a proper PC OS, officially supported or not.

 

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. What am I missing? Are you referring to virtual memory?

While I assume it's not what you meant, to me this reads as if you're talking about your phone's 1 gig (or whatever) of volatile memory and its 128 gigs of persistent memory interchangeably. To me, nothing fundamental has changed there over the past couple of decades - as a programmer I still use both that volatile memory and that persistent memory much as I would have on a PC a couple of decades ago. It's just that the hardware underneath is nicer, and these days there are a few more rules to abide by.

What Carter is talking about is devices with a single pool of memory that is both as plentiful as our current persistent memory and as fast as current volatile memory. Theoretically that could mean a fundamental shift in how data is used and stored - for example, there would be no need to "load" data by copying it from slow memory into faster memory... but that cuts both ways because we wouldn't want to accidentally clobber data that's meant to be persistent. (And I shudder to think what memory management would be like if the two were intermingled!)

 

And you keep explaining things I already understand and (usually, or perhaps generally) agree about completely.

The point I'm making is that the shift isn't going to be some giant revolution that will change everything, because (a) operating systems don't need to change much to deal with it, and (b) from a marketing standpoint there isn't any reason to saddle Joe Averge User with "Oh by the way Windows 12 is totally different but trust us it's awesomesauce." As devs it'll be nice but as users it'll be incremental at best, and I suspect mostly unnoticed. Carter was getting sort of wild-eyed about some impending Brave New World that's going to happen Real Soon Now and I was merely disagreeing about the scale of the impact.

In any case we've hit the Endless Loop stage of e-grousing, so I'm going to invoke a break-statement mic-drop and declare I no longer care.

 

Heh, yea. I didnt mean to imply it will revolutionize the world. Although it will change things alot, I think the biggest change will be for sales / normal people.

It will be so big in our society that EVERYONE will switch over to buy only those machines for their "super speed".

Since most of everyone who use computers, like businesses, govt, hospitals, fast food places, grandmas, etc. will want "one of the instant computers" that turn on & open applications instantly, instead of being "so slow."

What I'm interested in is how viruses / hackers will take advantage of TB's of "ram" replacing HDD's. And how it will impact file transfers to external drives (assuming those are updated tech too by the time xpoint becomes standard, if it does).

 

I know people who are still on Pentium 4s. We even have developers on these forums using them. Your average consumer has little to no interests in the actual specifications of their hardware. If they upgrade it'll either be because their existing computer cannot meet their needs or because marketing convinced them they "needed" the upgrade.

 

You clearly didn't even read the article explaining the tech I was talking about (Xpoint).

If youre not going to participate in conversation & just want to rant at strawmen with fingers in your ears, go for it. No one will stop you. They will just think less of you for it.

 

Your argument is the equivalent of dismissing the introduction of cellphones to society because some people still use landlines...

Just Wow, I've never read such hogwash.

You realize that hospitals alone use probably billions of dollars of computers, let alone every white collar business.

My god, the gaming industry alone...just the hardware...I'm pretty sure that's a billion dollar industry too...

"Instant Computers" and "Instantly Fully Loaded Applications" is a HUGE deal for everyone from grandma to gamedev.

These "Pentium 4" users...what a hilarious anecdote in the context of this conversation...

 

You're comparing apples to oranges. The difference between a cellphone and a landline is the same as the difference between a desktop and a laptop. Cellphones and laptops are popular because they are portable and in the early days you actually lost functionality compared to their less mobile counterparts. Speed has always been reduced.

Instantly starting operating systems and applications is only impressive when you compare it to your average computer running an average hard disk drive. Once you switch to solid state hardware the difference in speed isn't as big as you're making it out to be. At least as far as the average consumer is concerned.

My computer is currently equipped with a Samsung 850 EVO. Actual time from hitting the power button to having Windows fully loaded is approximately 15 to 20 seconds. My slowest application (Visual Studio) takes about 6 to 8 seconds to fully load but practically every other application is instant. Both Chrome and Firefox take one second at most.

 

How about we do NOT get too excited about future tech which might suck in the end because of a MYRIAD of reason we cannot foresee yet, or might just be nowhere as good as advertised when it finally arrives in our computers?

I mean, do you have xpoint drives used as RAM in your machine yet? I don't. And I will believe the hype when its running in my machine and rocking as hard as advertised. Until then I will just dismiss it as marketing hype with little substance to back it up.

Then your "Instant computers" and "Intstantly fully loaded applications" sound like another marketing gag. Yes, there are Memory bound applications that will profit a lot. Maybe the people running these actually DO need them to run much faster.
The average users program start up in half the time. Not that impressive when the startup time is already about a second. Maybe there are less microfreezes in memory intensive applications. But then I doubt many will see much of a difference when running the applications.
Some artist tools can now move from having to swap stuff to disk to just keep everything in memory. That will make the application easier to program, maybe will make some of the file corruption bugs disappear because of less writes to the disk.

Now, when we are talking about Grandma. Grandma most probably will not even notice if Skype or Whatsapp starts a little bit faster on their mobile phone. Hell, maybe slow RAM speed or small RAM Size is the least of her problems, because she has a phone from 2010 still! With a sucky SoC that cannot even display the Android UI with good performance.
You know how big the chances are that grandma buys a new Phone / Tablet / Laptop when those devices finally ditch RAM for an XPoint Ramdisk? Same chance as the chance that her device breaks and no longer start up.


The Pentium 4 user anecdote is very accurate in this context. Because 90% of users are using quite outdated machines. They will buy those XPoint Supercomputers you fantasize about when they come down in cost to the 400-500$ territory, which is what MOST people spend for their computers IN THE WEST. And they will only buy them once their old machine breaks or MS / Apple forces them to upgrade because their old hardware is no longer supported by the newest OS Versions, and their browser can no longer be updated with the old OS version.

Then we have the rest of the world. Did you know in the east Windows XP is still the most used Windows OS? And earlier OSes are still around?


TL;DR:
Cutting Edge Tech will not matter until it becomes cheap, and people are forced to upgrade, thus your revolution, IF it ever happens, might happen in 10 years or more.

And I would be catious with the hype. 90% of the time the end product is nowhere near as good as promised. And a Fast Disk / Big RAM alone does not make your computer fast. It solves some problems. Many others remain.

 

Marketing gag? It's the actual result of the technology..... it's not some option or software feature...

And I believe that article talked about its affordability. It's not an issue.

Future tech is always exciting, especially when it will result in major changes to how we use computers.

And yes, it's relevant when the entire thread is about the future of Microsoft.

This is especially exciting for gamedev, where some load enormous textures.

 

Technology that has yet to ship, right? Are the results of the technology being benchmarked by the company making it? Or are they being benchmarked by an ideally neutral third party?

 

Do you people even know what you're responding to? What the topic even is?

It's not 'a little bit faster'. It's instant. Everything.

Read the freaking article before posting. It's really not hard to do...

I've had my fill of 'people of the internet' for now. Back to gamedev. Enjoy your way less interesting Console vs PC forum war.

 

Instant versus one second. That said the real performance killer for Skype won't be the load times. It'll be your connection.

 

Boy, are you easy to anger.

Just answer one simple question: Is the tech already available to the end user, and can I get my hands on it to confirm the marketing BS?

If yes, let me see if I have the needed cash to become an early adopter. Failing that, I will wait for multiple UNBIASED reviews on the tech popping up online before forming an opinion.

If no, why are we even discussing? Then your posts read like fanboy wishful thinking, or worse marketing BS that you are just reiterating. Did you get paid by Intel to sell their technology on this forum by any chance?


On a more serious Note, just remember that we are not saying "you have no idea" or "you are wrong". All me, and most probably also @Ryiah are saying is that we believe the outrageous claims when they can be put to the test by an unbiased thirdparty, or even better ourselves.
And that no matter how cool that tech is, if it really delivers on the marketing BS, it will never make just as much of an impact on the total runtime of computing tasks as you seem to think it does.
Memory is not everything involved in a running computer, you know. Wake me up when we get this XPoint technology that actually works as advertised, AND Quantum computing CPU and GPUs, AND some future tech networking that makes for "instant networking" (C) ... because networking that is faster than what we deem possible today is automatically "instant", right? Wake me up when ALL of this happens. Then, maybe, computers will be almost as "instant" as you think they will be with 1TB of Xpoint driven Memory.